Reparationsby Megan Merchant I would quick-wrap each massacre in cellophane to clot the bleed, mend the blood-splay of galaxy-shaped holes bulleted through clothes with strips ripped from our closet of blue baby blankets. I would sew slip-covers for knife tips—out of lamb’s wool, soaked in coffee--because that brewed smell lives in some wistful, homesick part in all of us. I would plug the open-mouth barrels with strands of hair that birds might otherwise gather for their nests, untangle the church bells and scriptures, lay every letter into a wave, let the oceans sort it out. I would wind the naïve clock back to the crackled, morning cry, when the pinnacle of anger was being woken too early, before the sun, by a child who wanted nothing more than to be held. Megan Merchant’s poems and translations have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Kennesaw Review, Margie, International Poetry Review, and The Poetry of Yoga. Her ﬁrst full-length collection, Gravel Ghosts, is forthcoming though Glass Lyre Press.